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9 years of Apple text editor solo dev

papereditor.app

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Re: 9 years of Apple text editor solo dev

#61

Post by ziddoap »

KMnO4 wrote: post #47
Alifatisk wrote: post #6

> To my surprise, the Swift one had the full Swift runtime embedded into it — about 5MB, while the Objective-C one was super light — tens or maybe 100KB in total. That's a huge difference, but I believe it's because Swift is meant to be somewhat cross-platform, right?

That experiment was done in 2015, when the Swift runtime had to be included. If you build an app now, it will link to the system runtime and be close to 100kb as well. This seems to be premature optimization. The author forced himself to learn archaic Objective C for a completely unnecessary reason, and now is stuck with that design choice despite not having any benefits.

>The author forced himself to learn archaic Objective C for a completely unnecessary reason, and now is stuck with that design choice despite not having any benefits.

It's easy, now, to say that it was a poor choice/premature optimization/unnecessary/whatever. But, presumably, the author is unable to tell the future. At the time when the decision was made, there were benefits that the author deemed necessary (smaller distributable among other benefits).

Re: 9 years of Apple text editor solo dev

#63

Post by mattbrewsbytes »

papereditor wrote: post #56
biehl wrote: post #51

Lovely writeup. Making that webpage must have taken quite some time also? A question out of curiosity. What are your thoughts on re-writing in Swift? If it were me, I am sure my tech-fingers would itch for a rewrite, but my business hands would slap those thoughts away.

Thank you! I probably would have to do it at some point if Apple decides to completely deprioritize it. For now, Objective-C even has some benefits. It's more low-level and more hackable. And I think some older APIs are not even available in Swift.

Out of curiosity is that a hand crafted page? It is a nice flow with the animations and the graphic call-outs, etc. I'm personally not interested in the Obj-C code snippets but that overall layout of the page, the sidebar ToC, the minimalist design is just really stunning.

Also - how did you do the visuals in the "Gnarly Bits" section that split the page/components out into verticals? That is such an amazing way to display the internals of a thing like a page.

If these elements could be packaged into a blog theme for whatever blog hosting platforms are popular these days I bet you'd get a bunch of people to purchase. Nice work!

Re: 9 years of Apple text editor solo dev

#65

Post by toyg »

biehl wrote: post #51

Lovely writeup. Making that webpage must have taken quite some time also? A question out of curiosity. What are your thoughts on re-writing in Swift? If it were me, I am sure my tech-fingers would itch for a rewrite, but my business hands would slap those thoughts away.

Be real: Apple is not going to rewrite MacOs/iOs in Swift. Objective-C will always be there, offering faster and more robust features.

Just look at the Microsoft equivalent: yes, C# is good and all, but the hardcore Windows apps are still using (lightly-skinned) VC++ APIs - after almost 25 years since they started flogging .NET.

Swift is for the new rubes, bootcamp graduates and so on.

Re: 9 years of Apple text editor solo dev

#66

Post by mattbrewsbytes »

coldtea wrote: post #16
toxypol wrote: post #12

[flagged]

And $10/month subscription? What should something like Photoshop with 10000x the features and development costs then charge? $1000/month? I understand "keeping it simple" but not "keeping it simple AND charging a crazy price for it" (there are essential, complex apps, that charge much less than that). I guess, if you can get away with it...

I wish more software companies would take the approach of not bloating up everything and constantly updating everything. Its like the keeping up with the Joneses mentality but for software.

Re: 9 years of Apple text editor solo dev

#70

Post by papereditor »

WillAdams wrote: post #67

The fact that this supports the Touch Bar alone is _Huge_. Would it be possible to have a basic mode where one makes a one-time payment and has the option to hid all nagging about "Pro" features?

You can pay for the lifetime license, and it will do exactly that.
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